Wild Rovers (1971)
Wild Rovers (1971)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC | 16:9 | 720x480 | 7600 kbps | 7.4Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps
02:16:00 | USA | Western
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC | 16:9 | 720x480 | 7600 kbps | 7.4Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps
02:16:00 | USA | Western
Ross Bodine and Frank Post are cowhands on Walt Buckman's R-Bar-R ranch. Bodine is older and broods a bit about how he will get along when he's too old to cowboy. Post is young and rambunctious and ambitious for a better life than wrangling cows. When one of their fellow cowboys is killed in a corral accident, Post suggests a way into a better life for himself and his friend: robbing a bank. Bodine reluctantly joins in the plan and the two contrive to rob the local bank. They make good their escape initially, but Walt Buckman and his two sons, John and Paul, are incensed at this betrayal by their own trusted employees. John and Paul set out to bring Bodine and Post to justice.
Director: Blake Edwards
Cast: William Holden, Ryan O'Neal, Karl Malden, Lynn Carlin, Tom Skerritt, Joe Don Baker, James Olson, Leora Dana, Moses Gunn, Victor French, Rachel Roberts, Sam Gilman, Charles H. Gray, William Bryant, Jack Garner, Caitlin Wyles, Mary Jackson, William Lucking, Ed Bakey, Ted Gehring, Alan Carney, Ed Long, Patrick Sullivan Burke, Lee de Broux, Hal Lynch, Boyd 'Red' Morgan, Bennie E. Dobbins, Bob Beck, Geoffrey Edwards, Herb Tanney
Wild Rovers (1971)
Wild Rovers (1971)
"Wild Rovers" is about a couple of good-natured, none-too-bright Montana cowboys who, on the spur of the moment (and with a fine lack of reluctance), rob a small-town bank of $36,000 and then take off, in the direction of Mexico, with some vague idea of finding a cowboy paradise.
As might be expected of Blake Edwards, a director and a writer whose strengths are in romantic comedy ("Darling Lili"), in farce ("A Shot in the Dark") and in his own sophistication, "Wild Rovers' is a very odd, very peculiar Western. It uses just about an of the conventions known to the genre—from barroom brawls and crooked poker games to pursuing posses and passive prostitutes—to tell what is essentially a love story. It is, however, a love story in which the only real love takes the form of the idealized comradeship of two men.
Although the film, which opened yesterday at the Astor, Juliet 2 and 34th Street East Theaters, is rather long on narrative detail of no great excitement, it's made interesting, at least for me, by its conflicting impulses toward low comedy, realism, adventure and myth. It is, I suspect, exactly the sort of Western that someone who's never tried one before would elect to make—a first meal by a cook whose enthusiasms range from bitter melon soup to peche Melba.
Ross Bodine (William Holden), pushing 50 and with nothing to show for it except the lines in his face, and Frank Post (Ryan O'Neal), who is half Ross's age, short-tempered, affectionate and tough, are William Remington cowboys, without pasts or futures. They are men who exist only in terms of their jobs. Their mistake, prompted by the accidental death of a friend, and some rather comic musings on their own mortality, comes when they attempt to alter fate.
They have no great difficulty in knocking over the bank, but it is apparent, as soon as they do, that they are lost cowboys, doomed not by the posse that follows them but by their own witlessnesses.
Holden, who is aging with immense vigor as an actor, and O'Neal, who has what is basically the role that Ali MacGraw played in "Love Story," are most engaging as the odd couple on the range, a relationship that Edwards defines in a slow-motion montage that is more legitimately dramatic than lyrically effective: as Holden sets about to break a wild bronc, O'Neal, who is watching, turns somersaults in the snow in the kind of love dance that Arthur Hiller staged earlier in Harvard Yard.
Life was tough in the Old West, Edwards seems to say, and love had a way of getting worn out early or misplaced. The young 0'Neal almost kills a man who wants to take his dog away from him. Leora Dana, as the wife of the rancher for whom Holden and O'Neal work, allows her husband (Karl Malden) to dominate their sons, and blame her for their faults. In extremis, a puppy must be nursed by a mother cat.
It is possible, as you might have guessed by this time, to read all sorts of things into "Wild Rovers," which makes it worthy of the attention of film aficionados, though less committed audiences may well become restless.
The film is magnificently set in Western locations that lead, finally, to that greatest set of all (built, you might believe, for John Ford), that is, Monument Valley. It is an appropriate backdrop for the conclusion of a film that is more compelling as the work of a specific director (whose thoughts have here turned west) than as an isolated entertainment, as an end in itself.
IMDb
Wild Rovers (1971)
Wild Rovers (1971)
